


Awakenings

by one_flying_ace



Category: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 19:35:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5468420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/one_flying_ace/pseuds/one_flying_ace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on this prompt, for Yuletide 2015: <i>What I would really like is a story about a son of the Clayr - what happens when one of the Clayr has a son? What's his place in the world? What place does he make for himself, and how do the women of the glacier support him in his journey? I'd especially like it if Sanar and Ryelle mentor him, or one of them is his mother.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Awakenings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Colourofsaying](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colourofsaying/gifts).



> Written for [colourofsaying](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Colourofsaying/pseuds/Colourofsaying). I hope you like it! I struggled a little, mostly from feelings of not being able to do these books justice, but I'm hoping something coherent came out of your prompt. Happy Yuletide!

Until he is eleven, Berael grows up believing that the Clayr don’t bear male children. They have girls, whose skin goes nut-brown in the bright ice-light and whose hair is like sheets of barley silk, eyes of green and blue. Berael is nut-brown too, but his hair is almost white, paler than the palest Clayr’s, the subtlest of the things that make him different. 

It’s impossible, almost, being the only male Clayr. He learns from an early age not to expect or hope for the Sight. Too many whispers, almost at the edge of hearing, are among his earliest memories; the women talking about how there hasn’t been a boy born under the glacier in recorded memory (it’s a long time before he learns otherwise).

And he can remember, with startling clarity, the day when he was given his own room. The shame of realising it wasn’t because he has the Sight, but because he was a boy - a choice of birth made by a mother he doesn’t remember, who seems to have gone out of her way to make herself forgettable. Even Tavell, the Guardian of Youth, can’t place his mother, beyond remembering the fuss made when she birthed a boy, instead of a Clayr. 

That’s how he grows up: as a boy, not as a Clayr. 

\----------

When Berael is eleven, he meets Sanar for the first time. She, like all of the older Clayr, scares him more than a little. It’s tangled up with anger and misery, makes him a mess of sharp edges and sulky silence. He’s desperate to be part of the family that makes its home in the glacier, but none of the women know how to accept him yet, for all they do their best.

He bumps into the twin coming back from an Awakening ceremony, scuffing his way down a small corridor that no one really uses any more. She’s walking slowly, lost in thought, and he walks into her before he realises she’s there. He doesn’t know her from her twin, then, simply sees an elder Clayr wearing the circlet and carrying a wand tucked under one arm a little carelessly. 

“We’ve been remiss in our duties towards you,” she says when he stammers out an apology, reaching out to tuck a strand of too-pale hair behind his ear. It’s a gesture he’s dreamt a mother making, a mother who maybe chose to bear a girl-child, instead of leaving a boy-child alone to try to find a place in the glacier that no one wants to give him.

“What do you mean?” The gesture startles him into the question, forgetting to be polite to his elders and betters - which means everyone with the Sight, really - but she doesn’t snap the way Tavell does. 

“There was another like you, not long ago.” She looks sad, but Berael doesn’t feel like it’s anything to do with him. “A young woman who had no place either, and we nearly failed her completely.” 

“Who?”

“I am Sanar,” she says, instead of answering the question. “I will keep an eye on you, or my sister Ryelle will, or both of us.” A smile lifts a little of the sadness off her face. “We’re often together, or rarely alone; what would you have us change, if we could?”

“I want the Sight,” he answers, caught off-guard and still unsure. At once he flushes, ducks his head in awkwardness and longs for the quiet of his own little room. Sanar lifts his chin with a cool hand and looks at him searchingly.

“You’ve been Seen,” she says, softly, and it sends a thrill down his spine. She says more, but he doesn’t remember it afterwards, doesn’t even remember her walking him back to his room and leaving him with a book on Charter magic.

Things change after that, although he’s a little too young to really connect it with the conversation. Several of the older ones start to check on him with greater frequency, and start to ask him how he is; the whispers stop too, at least in his hearing, as if they’ve finally realised how sound carries in the walls of stone and ice. 

It won’t be until he’s older, and wiser, that he wonders why she was walking down the same small corridor as him.

\---------

Several things happen when he’s thirteen. Firstly, Ryelle opens up a world beyond his own limited experiences. The Clayr leave their glacier only when called to do so; they’re secure in the ice, and although he knows there’s a world outside, he doesn’t often wonder about it. Then Ryelle calls him to help her, one day, and he finds himself in a paperwing high above Sunfall, whistling for all his might. 

“You’re a strong Charter mage,” she’d said, “and I’ve heard you whistle; you won’t let it get away with anything.” He hadn’t questioned what she meant until they were sat in the sleek craft, and he’d felt the testing slyness of it under his hands as Ryelle whistled up the first stream of Charter marks. 

The marks to strengthen and support her had leapt to his lips, and he’d whistled along, felt the craft buck and shudder and come under their control. 

Later, on solid ground again, she claps him on the back and grins. “Eltaren couldn’t have done better himself,” she says, and he ducks his head in pleasure.

The name is unfamiliar, but it sticks with him long after Ryelle delivers him to the hangar chief and instructs her to add Berael to the rota. Days later, the name still a pocket of curiosity in the back of his mind, a word with a librarian sends him off into the stacks with a sending to help. He sees a dark-haired girl there, as startlingly different in her way as he is in his own, but gives her no more thought.

What the books reveal is the truth in something he already knows, after overhearing snippets of conversations (or arguments), that he isn’t the only boy born under the glacier. There have been others - not many, Ryelle adds, but he’s not the only one. Eltaren, the best paperwing pilot the Clayr has ever seen, was one of them. 

Ryelle and Sanar are exceptional pilots, but he can see the mark of Eltaren in their whistling, recognises strings of Charter symbols they’ve been teaching him. It gives him hope, that one day he might be more than an- an aberration, though he doesn’t use the word in front of the twins any more. There are other stories too, of men who helped build the Starmount stair and stopped the Dead, or worse, from getting into the glacier. 

Years later he looks back and realises how skillfully she’d dropped crumbs of information into his lap, just enough to help him find the records without pointing the way too clearly. 

He also Awakens, to the shock of most of the glacier, including himself. A Watch of ninety-eight Sees him, although he gathers from whispers that they were trying to See something else entirely. He wears the circlet and changes to the robes of an adult, a Clayr, although he prefers the tough overalls of someone assigned to the paperwing hangar, like he has been for several months. He’s young, but the combined backing of Sanar and Ryelle count for a lot; his Charter magic is strong, and he can whistle better than most of the others who work in the hangar, which is a useful skill when working with the often tricky paperwings.

His Sight is weak, but he doesn’t worry about that. A thought springs into his head one day, and won’t move, until he has to ask. Sanar and Ryelle check in on him several times a month, although at the moment he can tell there’s something - or someone - else on their minds. After twisting himself into knots over it, he bumps into them one day on his way back from a normal Nine Day Watch and almost trips over the words in his haste to get them out. 

“I thought- because I Awakened later, are you, or Sanar-”

“Oh, no, child-” Berael flinches, ready to flee, but when he forces himself to look Ryelle’s smile has no hint of pity in it. If anything she looks sad. “We aren’t your mother. Or rather, one of us isn’t, and neither is the other.”

He hunches his shoulders, presses his hands to the wall behind him and feels the bite of the cold stone. “I just thought-”

“I know. We- there are choices we’ve made, Sanar and I. And choices we have yet to make.” Berael looks up again when the older woman falls silent, sees them both looking at nothing with the blankness of the Sight. Once he’d have envied them that, but now he knows what the Sight is like when it isn’t being focused. 

They slip out of it and he walks with them, doesn’t bring up the idea again, doesn’t point out how impossible it is that no one truly remembers his mother when they’re all cousins.

He comforts himself with knowing that the differences between him and the other Clayr are only physical. He has the Sight, and a place in the paperwing hangar; he can remember a time when those around him sought to set him apart, but they’ve fallen silent now. Something is happening outside the glacier, something that worries the Clayr and makes them look beyond the fact that he was born male. 

He sometimes gets his token, the same as all the others, and tries his hardest to focus on the fragments they all strive to See with clarity.

\---------

Two weeks after his fifteenth birthday, he gets into an argument with several of the other Clayr his own age, and ends up angrily throwing rocks off the Starmount stair. The glacier is silent, save for the few not called to the largest Watch they can muster - or in his case excluded, at the demand of a few old Clayr. He doesn’t know why, had believed that they were his family now, more cousins than snowflakes on the glacier accepting him as a Clayr.

“I was a mistake.”

“No Clayr has a child without meaning too,” Ryelle says, a voice of calm reason since he was eleven.

“An aberration, then.”

“No.” Now Sanar’s hand is firm on his shoulder. “Never that. A choice, one made by your mother. If we knew- well. We don’t. But it was a choice, and one she held to.”

“Despite opposition,” Ryelle adds. He looks up at her, squinting against the snow glare.

“Opposition?”

“There are those in the Clayr,” Ryelle started, pausing at her twin’s hesitant gesture but carrying on, “who believe we should always have girl-children. That the Sight of male Clayr is different, and fractures the futures we try to reveal. You know that; their voices have got stronger, as we have failed to See what we need to.”

“But,” Sanar says quickly, before her twin can carry on, “your mother knew that, and still chose to bear you, as a boy. There must be a reason for it.” All his life, Berael has known the two Clayr as voices of comfort and reason; they’ve mentored him and offered support, given him training with the finnicky paperwings and shown him that he isn’t alone, even if the other male Clayr are all long dead or lost to the outside world.

Not even their combined support can change the fact that he has no place, and that he was excluded from the fifteen sixty-eight.

But- “I haven’t been Seen doing anything.” Berael knows there’s bitterness in his voice, but it’s his birthday and he doesn’t care. Something has happened, and he has an idea that it’s got something to do with the tall, dark-haired girl he knows the twins have helped too, but it’s, him who was excluded. Ryelle sighs, and the two women exchange a look, but they don’t say anything.

As birthday’s go, it’s a bad one.

\----------

At seventeen, the glacier is home, and in the way of homes, it has begun to chafe. He knows the halls inside out, wishes he could find happiness in its icy embrace the way the other Clayr do, or at least solace in the way he knows the dark-haired girl did. But years of being set aside by the others have left their mark; now he longs for the outside, pushes the paperwings higher each time he takes one out, sometimes catches himself wishing he didn’t have to take them back down. 

He’s washing his face in the empty bathroom when his splinter of Sight wells up, scattering an image over the polished surface of the long mirror. When it fades he takes a deep breath and goes to get together what he needs. Berael isn’t a child any more; he’s a grown man, a male Clayr, and not even the oldest, most conservative of the glacier-women stops him from joining the watches. 

They need all the Sight they can muster, even though the Binding worked and they can See all of the Kingdom again. There’s a lot of cleaning up to do, and the Abhorsen sends for the results of the Watches with regularity. He’s seen Sanar and Ryelle fly off in the green and silver paperwings many times, but has never flown one himself further than the edge of the glacier.

Several hours later, he’s waiting inside the paperwing hanger, watching the door he knows will open long before two figures come through it. 

“You’ve Seen me,” Berael says, when the twin coat-clad women reach him. They both - as well as he knows them, they are impossible to tell apart when muffled in outdoor gear - push their goggles back to reveal identical green eyes, and they speak in turns.

“We have.”

“We Saw you with the Abhorsen-”

“-and the King-”

“-who both needed you-”

“-so you need to travel quickly.” They finish together, and he nods, lifting his pack from where it was resting at his feet.

“I Saw this,” he tells them, and two sets of eyes crinkle with a smile hidden by their scarves. “Ever since I was child, you’ve helped me.”

“Not for the last time, we hope,” says the twin on the left. 

“We haven’t Seen your path,” says the twin on the right, “but we trust we will.”

“Or that you’ll See it yourself.”

They help him into the paperwing, a newer craft he helped to make, the paint still fresh. One at a time they lean over and hug him, shouting their goodbyes over the wind that rushes in as the hangar doors slide open. He adjusts his goggles, calls up the Charter marks in his mind, and lets them slip off his tongue in a golden stream. As the whistle sounds, and the marks glow in the freezing air, Berael’s heart lifts. He doesn’t know what he’s going to find, away from the Glacier, or what path he’s going to find himself on. 

But somewhere out there, he has a place. It’s been Seen. He just needs to find it, and earn it.

Beneath him, the last of the Charter marks sink into the paperwing’s sleek body, and it leaps out of the hangar and off the glacier with a whoop of joy from its pilot.


End file.
